


Effort at Speech Between Two People

by palomeheart



Series: pff bingo 2019 [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2009 Era (Phandom), Communication, Introspection, M/M, thoughts about language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 16:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21139958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palomeheart/pseuds/palomeheart
Summary: Learning a new lover is like learning a whole nother language, Phil’s mother had told him once.for the bingo square 'communication'





	Effort at Speech Between Two People

**Author's Note:**

> Title (and inspiration) from the lovely poem of the same name by Muriel Rukeyser, which you can have [read to you here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEz68Dq3FQQ), if you like. I watched it this morning and just felt like mucking about in some language mush for a while, and thinking about how we communicate with each other and how we don't.

Learning a new lover is like learning a whole nother language, Phil’s mother had told him once. He had been young. Not too young to hear it, but younger then, and younger than his years. Young enough to cringe away from that intimate, grown-up word, that private, provocative word coming out of her mouth. Martin had laughed at the look on his face, ignoring the matching one on his own. Their dad made some sort of gentle, well-intended jibe while their mum flushed with absolutely no shame, smile glowing.

She had been tipsy, and happy, laughing into her husband’s shoulder. Her lover. Phil’s father. Phil was tipsy too, for the first time (at least around his family) and the lightheaded rush of _that_ and _this_ made him want to crawl between the couch cushions. 

In this moment, at the juncture of these words, Phil had never had a lover. He’d had a lot of maybes, almosts, not quites. He’d made love, or had sex, or fucked. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know the language, maybe. But he’d never had a lover, he was sure of that. It had felt like a revelation too big for his still growing body, an admission too naked for his unshared heart. 

He’s a little older now, and he thinks it makes a little more sense. He’s not old. Still young, and feeling it more acutely than ever, but a few steps further forward. Not old, but old enough, or experienced enough, or foolish enough to think he knows what she might have been saying. Knows, at least, enough to begin to imagine.

Now, he has a lover. Perhaps. They haven’t made love, or had sex, or fucked. Probably. Not in person, anyway. Nothing real, nothing tangible, nothing he could sink his teeth his teeth into, form his lips around. No new words and rhythms for his tongue to learn. Just the possibility, the virtual echo of the things they promise each other in their spoken, shared future. 

Still, he is older, he has met a boy, and he’s thinking about his mother’s words on that night two years ago.

And he’s learning a new language. This language of Dan. He’d studied linguistics in uni, but he’s never felt so ill-equipped for anything in his life. Learning Dan is not memorizing nouns and verbs and conjugations. It’s more like being pitched into the roiling ocean without being taught to swim, pushed out of a moving train and being told to run.

He spends hours coming up with metaphors and similes and analogies of what it’s like and what it is and what it could be, and none of them are good enough. None of them can hold the bright terror and bubbling excitement and biting newness of it all. Whenever Phil tries to express it, it comes out sounding like he’s being tortured. Maybe he is, a little. He doesn’t know how to do this, and he doesn’t know how to learn this, but he’s doing it anyway. Learning.

It’s like suddenly trying to shove the whole of another person into your already occupied self, the immense press and stretch and swell of that.

Dan wants to talk. Phil wants to talk, too, but Dan wants to _talk__._ Fill Phil with his words. He tells Phil about his keenest pains, his deepest indignities, his darkest thoughts. 

They are heavy. 

Phil, untested, unaccustomed to the enormity of it, feels his metaphorical arms grow tired. He thinks of stopping Dan, sometimes, telling him it’s too much, but then thinks how Dan’s metaphorical arms must feel. He thinks that’s maybe part of the point of learning this new language. 

What good is a language just one person knows? How heavy is that knowledge, unsharable. Alone. 

Phil takes the words, learns the movement of his tongue around them, commits the syntax to memory, until it’s almost second nature.

* * *

“How do you do it?” he asks one evening, drunk on exhaustion and the warm hum of a family game night and the trilling tug of a skype call waiting for him upstairs.

“Do what, love?” his mum asks, voice a soft blanket over the the quiet kitchen. There are times he wishes to never leave this moment, this familiar, easy language of two he learned even before he was born.

“Learn another language.”

He can’t bring himself to say more, and he watches her sift past the words, digging for his different meaning, reading his blush, the tapping of his right ring finger against the warm but cooling mug cradled in his hands. 

She sighs, soft and entirely un-exasperated, a gentle release of surprise, joy. She’s admitted to worrying that he’s lonely. His shifting silence suggests he's not. Still, she finishes washing the last plate from dinner and folds the dish towel with slow, steady hands before taking her mug and joining him at the kitchen table.

“Child, you already know how.”

He leans into the term of endearment, and away from the assumption. 

“I don’t, though. I’ve never—”

Mercifully, she cuts him off. The squirming shame in him wriggles, then stills.

“You talk to me, even though it’s apparently mortifying.”

He can’t help but laugh, offer her a smile as he feels his shoulders tense. He’s caught between wanting to slink off to sort this out in his own fumbling solitude, and pressing further, hands scrabbling against the world-wisened knowledge of her.

“Not the same,” he mumbles into the muffle of his sleeve, a compromise.

“No. But not completely different either. It’s different with everyone, but it’s still the same sort of thing. And it’s more natural than it probably feels right now.”

“But how do I…” He trails off, and she takes pity, again. Hears the unspoken, again.

“Listen. Talk. Meet in the middle, when you can. Ask why, when you can’t.” Each of her sentences are punctuated with shrugs, as if this is a casual, unimportant thing. Phil swallows the words to keep them safe.

“Thanks, mum.” He sets his mug down decisively, thinking this is all, but of course it’s not that simple. His words spoke questions he still hasn't answered. 

“And is who is this girl you’re so keen on? Are we going to get to meet her?”

It’s funny, the way one small word can sink a whole sentence. 

“It’s not—maybe. Not yet. They might not be… what you expect, though.” 

He makes eye contact finally, breathes through a few heaves of his chest. He hasn’t said anything, really, but her gaze is sharp and moving and he can see something click. Flashes of emotion. Confusion, uncertainty, concern. His stomach plummets as he rocks to his feet. He's halfway through the door before his mum's voice tugs him back, an offering.

“That’s alright, dear. Anyone who’s got you this flustered is worth the wait, I’m sure.”

* * *

“What’s the matter?” Phil asks, not having to pause to consider why he’s asking. He knows the sag of Dan’s shoulders, the drawn curl of his lips, the stilted cadence of his hello. He’s learning.

Dan plays with something off camera for a moment, eyes averted, before muttering, “My mum doesn’t want me to come next week.”

Phil tries to steel himself. They’ve volleyed back and forth the same nervous hedgings for a week now. Just because tickets had been bought, plans made, expectations disastrously managed, didn’t mean it would work out. They wanted, they wanted, they wanted. That didn’t mean the rest of the world did.

“I thought it was your dad who was against it,” Phil says, proud of how normal his voice sounds.

“He was. He is. But my mum started questioning it too. Who I was staying with, how I knew them, if she knew them. Why I couldn’t just go up in two weeks when she could take some time off work and go with me.” 

Phil can taste the bitterness in Dan’s voice on his tongue, and he licks his lips to try to chase it away. 

“Can’t you just… talk to her?”

“And tell her what?”

A silence settles between them. Phil hasn’t quite gotten a handle on silences yet, and how they fit into the rest of it. Sometimes they feel like walls Phil is probably meant to do something about. Sometimes they’re rivers he knows he could not make it across, should not try to ford. And then again they feel like bays sometimes, calm and warm and cradling him, head thrown back to see the wide, blue sky.

In this moment, their pause, he’s yet older still and he knows now that languages are not just for lovers. That he forms a new language with everyone he meets, and it’s just a question of how far it develops. How much effort they each put into it, how well suited they are to meet in the brackish middle of them. He and Dan had fallen into it easily enough, for all of the clumsy newness of it. He and his mum, natural from the start. Dan and his mum… they were still speaking different dialects.

Phil doesn’t know what that feels like, not precisely, so he doesn’t know what to say. He can relate, his father feeling like a far off, foreign land sometimes, but to have his mum always know just the right words feels like such an integral part of existence to him. Just talking should be enough. The words should work themselves out. 

Learning Dan has been learning how untrue that is, though it has been a truth for Phil. It has been learning how trapped in his own head, his own language of one, he’s been this whole time, automatically converting everyone else into his own private dialect and committing all of the errors and missed nuance that translation demands. How paying attention to the patterns and variances of how someone speaks can tell him more about them than the words themselves.

Of course nothing is ever perfect. The whole point of someone being else is their being other. Their being unknowable. At least a little. Pieces overlap, make it easier. Contrast, draw a little farther away. Pronouns get mixed up, are assumed, and suddenly Phil and his mum are having entirely different conversations. Care around pronouns was noticed, and suddenly Dan and Phil had a little bit of common ground, a place to rest with their ballooning expectations.

Dan breathes a little sigh into the crackling line of the call, bringing Phil back into the present. Still, he doesn’t speak. Part of their language (that he’s leaning, still learning) is silence. Is waiting, is pausing, is listening.

Until he can’t take it anymore. “If you can’t come—”

“No,” Dan interrupts, jagged edges of his voice cutting through Phil’s already deflated reassurances. “No,” he repeats softer, gentler. “I’m coming to visit you. If you still want me to.”

Their language is the push and pull of tides, the fumbling back and forth of unsure feet learning new dance steps. A halting voice, catching over an incorrect conjugation. The complicated projection of the less familiar future tense, when present seems safer. The hedging of conditional. Phil hopes they will grow more certain, then hopes they will never lose this edge of learning and trying and earnestness. The thrill of new words to discover, new ways to communicate your previously inexpressible thoughts.

“Of course I do. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“I’m already in trouble,” Dan mutters into crossed arms, and Phil doesn’t know what that means. In trouble with his parents? Some sort of deeper trouble he seems to be always alluding to? The same sort of bottomless trouble Phil feels like he’s tripping into every time he sees Dan’s dimpled smile?

In the end, Phil changes the subject to something light that he knows will make Dan laugh, because that’s something he feels fluent in, and Dan latches on easily to the diversion. 

He’s still learning. They don’t talk about what Dan can’t tell his mum, and why. They don’t talk about what Phil did tell his mum, without precise words. Not needing them. Maybe this is their own version of not needing them. Maybe they will need them later. Maybe that’s part of the point of language, part of the beauty. That it keeps evolving, learning new ways to express itself. Simplifying, complicating. Growing.

Either way, Dan is a language Phil never wants to stop learning.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! You can [reblog it here](https://phanomeheart.tumblr.com/post/188526669352/effort-at-speech-between-two-people-t-21k) if you like.


End file.
